This invention relates to food product cookers, and in particular to apparatus for cooking shells for enchiladas from tortillas.
A variety of food product cookers have been utilized in the past, and prior art devices which provide for continuous cooking of tortilla type products are shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,948,160 and 4,530,275, and in applicant's copending application U.S. Ser. No. 927,959 filed Nov. 7, 1986.
Enchilada shells have been produced in the past on machinery of this general type. However the prior art machinery has required considerably operator attention and has had relatively low production rates. In the earlier machinery, the product carriages utilized a sleeve or tube on which the tortilla is wrapped and clamped in position. However such machinery required manual feeding of product to the carriage and incorporated a fixed carriage construction with no product holder pivoting or carriage translation. Other disadvantages and problems in the operation of the earlier design include slow operation and low production rates. The carriage configuration and the carriage spacing resulted in a very long machine. The normal ten feet long oil trough was extended to 16 feet, but the output was still very low. The long oil trough, oil heating pan and transport trough resulted in an oil system that was large and bulky. This system required an excessively large volume of oil and the oil tended to break down faster with correspondingly high free fatty acids. This earlier system required an oil pump to circulate the oil, and oil spilling over the trough sides was common. Maintaining adequate heat along the 16 foot trough for frying was a common problem, and the fired enchilada tubes were oiler because they were held in a horizontal position while frying.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a new and improved cooker for enchilada shells and the like, and in particular a cooker which provides an improvement in product quality with a reduction in product rejection rate and an increase in rate of production.
It is another object of the invention to provide such a cooker which automatically provides control of uncooked product feed including synchronization of product feed with cooker operation and with product carriage drive. A particular object is to provide such a feed configuration which does not require manual assistance in loading or in unloading.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a new and improved product carriage and control for the motions of the product carriage components, including the motion of holder sections between open and closed conditions, the positioning of the holder relative to the carriage arm in normal and aligned positions, and the translation of the carriage with respect to the drive chain.
These and other objects, advantages, features and results will more fully appear in the course of the following description.